Banig is a Filipino tutor for heritage speakers — the people who grew up with Tagalog in the house, follow it perfectly at the dinner table, and go quiet when it is their turn to answer.
Banig is the woven mat a Filipino household sleeps on, eats on, and sits on to talk. It is made one strand at a time, and it is only strong because the strands cross. That is also how a language comes back.
Most Filipino courses start from zero: this is how you say hello. That is the wrong starting line for someone whose ear is already fluent. If you can follow a phone call with your lola but answer her in English, the gap is not comprehension. It is production — pulling the words out under time pressure, in front of family, without the pause that makes you switch back.
Banig works only on that gap. The English side is the prompt and the Tagalog side is the answer, every time, because that is the direction that is hard.
Every card is scheduled by spaced repetition. Get one right easily and it comes back much later; miss it and it returns within minutes. The waiting is not idle time — the interval just before you would have forgotten is where a word moves from recognized to available.
This is why short daily sessions beat long weekend ones, and why the app will sometimes tell you there is nothing to do. Believe it, and go read a dialogue instead.
The progress mat on the front page — the weave — is the whole curriculum at a glance: one thread per word, sentence and lesson, filling in as you go.
Speaking and typing lay down different tracks, and the one you need is speaking. Say your answer aloud before you type it, even alone, even badly. Playback uses whatever speech voices your device has; if you have no Filipino voice installed, it will approximate with Spanish — close on the vowels, wrong on ng. The pronunciation section tells you what to listen past.
Banig is small and opened one person at a time. Signing up confirms your email; after that an admin switches the account on. Until both have happened, the lessons stay closed — not as a formality, but because the database itself refuses to hand them over. It also means your progress is yours: it follows you to any device you sign in on, and no one else can read it.
It is not a course, a certificate, or a substitute for talking to people. It is a way to arrive at the table with enough words to try. The best thing that can happen in this app is that you say Nahihiya akong magsalita — I am shy about speaking — to an actual relative, and get the answer that sentence usually gets.
Plain language, because terms nobody reads protect nobody. If something here is unclear, ask before you agree to it.
Banig is operated by [OPERATOR] ("we", "us"). You can reach us at the contact address below. Banig is a small, privately run language-practice tool, not a company product with a support desk.
Banig helps heritage speakers practise Filipino (Tagalog). It is a study aid. It is not a certified course, a qualification, a translation service, or a source of professional, legal, medical or immigration advice. The language material is written for everyday family speech and may not match formal, regional or academic usage.
You need an account to use the lessons. Two things must happen before it opens: you confirm your email address, and an administrator activates the account by hand. We may decline to activate an account, and we do not have to give a reason.
Use Banig to learn. Do not:
If you do any of these, we may suspend or delete the account without notice.
The vocabulary, sentences, dialogues, grammar lessons, wording, design and code of Banig belong to us or our licensors. You get a personal, non-transferable licence to use them for your own study, for as long as your account is active. That licence does not include redistribution, resale or training machine-learning systems on the material.
The Filipino language itself, obviously, belongs to nobody and everybody.
The words and notes you save under "words from your family" stay yours. We store them so we can show them back to you and schedule them for review, and we do not publish them, sell them, or show them to other learners. You can delete any of them at any time, or erase all of your progress from the account panel.
Do not put anything in those fields you would mind us seeing while fixing a bug.
To run the app we hold: your email address, the name you chose, an encrypted form of your password, whether your account is confirmed and active, your review history and streak, and the words you added. That is the lot. It is stored in our database provider's infrastructure (Supabase, running on Amazon Web Services), and access to it is restricted per-account at the database level, so one learner's rows cannot be read by another.
We use it to run the service and nothing else. We do not sell it, we do not use it for advertising, and there are no third-party trackers in these pages. Ask us to delete your account and we will delete the data with it.
Banig is provided as it is. We do not promise it will always be reachable, that lessons will stay unchanged, that scheduling will always be correct, or that your data can never be lost. Material may be added, corrected or removed at any time. Keep your own copy of anything you would be upset to lose.
Speech playback uses the voices already installed on your device. We do not control their quality or accuracy, and on many devices Filipino is not among them.
You can stop using Banig whenever you like and ask us to delete your account. We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or shut the service down entirely, with reasonable notice where we can give it.
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of Banig, including lost progress or lost data. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, such as for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
We may update these terms. If a change matters, we will say so in the app or by email before it takes effect. Carrying on using Banig after that means you accept the new version. The date at the top always tells you which version you are reading.
These terms are governed by the laws of [JURISDICTION], and its courts have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.
Questions, deletion requests, or an account stuck waiting for approval: —